


Over the Rainbow

by Sangerin



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossover, F/F, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-26
Updated: 2005-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:24:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sangerin/pseuds/Sangerin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Are you still looking for perfection?’</p><p>Multiple Dawn pairings, non-linear narrative structure, not exactly fluffy.  Post-all existing canon.  Sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over the Rainbow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flurblewig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flurblewig/gifts).



_‘Did you love me? I mean, if I hadn’t died. Could you have loved me?’_

 _She’s having a conversation with a dead woman. One who came back as the embodiment of evil, left Willow haunted and in tatters._

 _‘Could you have loved me?’ Cassie asks._

 _Dawn considers. ‘I don’t know.’_

 _Silence._

 _‘Would it have made any difference?’ Dawn asks._

*

Amanda was pale and scared, and needed Dawn’s arms around her and Dawn’s whispered words in her ears. They giggled together in corners until Buffy told them to go outside, and Dawn cursed her own home, which no longer had spaces in which to spend secret time. Spike was chained up in the basement, Potentials lurked in every nook and cranny, and Andrew staked out the bathroom with a video camera. So they went to the park and sat by the side of the lake and talked, and that was where and when Dawn leaned over and kissed Amanda and Amanda kissed back.

It was timid and clumsy and furtive; tumbling together on Dawn’s bed in the afternoons with the door locked, sneaking outside in the mornings once the sun was up and it was safe. They laughed together at the absurdity of it all, and Dawn cried silently the first time Amanda’s tongue dipped between Dawn’s legs.

In her dreams she became Amanda, lying dead on the ground, cut through by a talon, crushed beneath the falling earth, suffocating despite slayer strength she’d barely had the time to test. In the dream-state she was more than herself, more than Amanda. She became essence rather than form, energy instead of matter. She glowed green and gold and red, held up the caver and caught Amanda to herself one last time before waking to empty arms. She cried for days in secret, and emerged rebellious.

*

 _‘Would I have been your innocent?’_

 _‘You ask too many questions,’ says Dawn._

 _Silence._

 _Time stretches and contracts, a thousand years or mere moments._

 _‘Do you ever feel something is missing?’ Dawn._

 _‘There are things I miss. Sensations.’_

 _‘Pleasures.’_

 _Cassie would lean forward if she could. ‘Yes, you would.’_

*

The portrait was dark. Shadows fell across the subject’s face, and there was a glint in the eyes, something between avarice and lasciviousness.

‘Is this how you see me?’ Dawn asked, without turning around.

‘Yes.’

‘That I’m... cruel?’

Nina swallowed, ‘Doomed, I think,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Dawnie.’

‘I’m not a kid anymore,’ Dawn snapped, spinning around.

‘No, you’re no,’ replied Nina. ‘If anyone would know that, it’s me.’

Dawn stood still, arms crossed against her chest. Said nothing, just looked at Nina. Nina, in a blouse with its neckline low enough to be a parody of décolletage, her face a Botecelli study of innocence.

‘Rome always suited you, Dawn,’ she said, her tone cutting. ‘A den of iniquity with a holy face.’

‘It suits you as well,’ said Dawn. ‘Down to the ground and beyond.’ She crossed the room with three strides. ‘I’ve been inside you. I know you. I’ve felt your clash contract around my hand, I’ve seen your eyes roll back and I’ve heard your screams. I know you.’ She took hold of Nina’s shoulders and kissed her hard, moving one hand down to stretch the low neck of Nina’s blouse until it revealed one full, white breast. ‘I’ve never been a little girl,’ Dawn said. ‘No actual childhood, only one that was created for me. But I have something better.’ Her fingers closed around Nina’s nipple, stroking and rubbing and finally, pinching. Dawn kissed Nina again, catching her gasp of air in her mouth. ‘Power,’ she said, breathing into Nina. ‘Power.’ She pushed Nina back onto a wooden chair, then sat on her lap, straddling her. She pulled off her own top, leaving her breasts bare in front of Nina’s face.

‘It’s not power like yours,’ she said as Nina undid the fastenings of Dawn’s trousers. ‘Not the power of the moon, turning you brutal. Animalistic.’ She drew in a breath as Nina’s fingers entered her. ‘It’s not power like my sister’s,’ she said, her hips moving with Nina’s hand, ‘to fight and destroy.’ Nina lowered her mouth to Dawn’s breasts and Dawn held her there. She rocked against Nina’s fingers and lips. The chair legs thumped against the floor and Nina drew blood from Dawn’s breasts.

‘Shall I tell you,’ Dawn said between gasps, ‘what my power is? What I’ve learned while I’ve been here in Rome? Shall I tell you my future?’

She lifted Nina’s head from her breast and kissed Nina’s mouth. It was almost a gentle kiss, and Nina pulled her fingers from Dawn and tilted her hips up – a subtle hint for Dawn to play her own part.

Dawn lowered her hand to Nina, but it slid through Nina’s skirt and through Nina, rather than into her. Dawn glowed red and gold and green, slipped inside and through and out again.

She kissed Nina once more, solid lips becoming insubstantial.

‘I am power.’

*

 _There is no physicality, but they improvise. Compromise. Adapt._

 _Feeling and sensation are the jangling of nerve-endings, stretching to the consciousness. Body chemistry with neither body nor chemistry is a challenge._

 _They have always relished challenge._

*

She never quite found the perfection she was looking for, but came close, having slipped out of linearity and embodiment, drifting between dimensions of time and space. Hovering in and around and above and beyond a girl-woman-amazon-automaton called River.

Everything was physical. Fighting, scavenging, negotiations almost always required the back of a hand to the face or a knee to the gonads. Play, even rest. Always the lithe, lean body, throwing itself into life.

Dawn never entirely knew whether she found River or River found her first. Never quite knew if the soul was damaged or intact. Never really cared.

River used to live on a ship with others. Now she had her own. She searched for the people who made her, who had created her as artifice. Created by others to serve their ends. She sought them out, not to know her origin but to avenge it.

Dawn had known River’s strengths, her obsessions, her powers before she joined River’s quest. River learned Dawn’s night by night and day by day. Dawn found the planetary bases, River sought out their hearts and minds. Dawn slipped between cracks in the walls and time, and wrapped around River, brought her through. They stood back to back and fought off attacking defenders. They stood together in pools of blood and grinned.

‘Simon wouldn’t be happy,’ River said at night. Plaintive, like a child, the way Dawn liked her best.

‘Simon isn’t here,’ Dawn replied.

‘No,’ said River, and opened her mouth to Dawn’s tongue.

When she lay on the floor of the shuttle, River’s hair was a contrast to her pale skin, a pillow beneath her frail-seeming head.

‘Who would guess that you were so much older than me?’ River asked as she arched her hips to meet Dawn’s fingers.

‘Simon wouldn’t like this, either,’ said River as Dawn’s tongue and mouth and fingers slid and pushed and pinched and thrust between her thighs.

Childlike River wept as Dawn traced patterns on River’s breasts, blood on her cuticles.

*

 _‘Are you still looking for perfection?’_

 _‘Always,’ said Dawn._

 _They wind around each other. Twist in and out of each other, creating sensation, reliving experience._

 _‘It’s a long search,’ says Cassie, slipping in and through. ‘Long.’ A stroke. ‘Hard.’ Another. ‘Intense.’ A third._

 _Dawn’s thoughts jerk, like words spoken through gritted teeth. ‘The way I like it.’_

 _Cassie curls herself around Dawn. Pull, pinches, pushes, makes her shake and cry, scream noiselessly into the void. ‘I learned from Illyria.’ Shimmers blue and silver, voice dropping, lengthening. ‘They all did.’_

 _Dawn falls into time, into body, into earth. Again a twenty-two year old woman, on a hard stone floor. Above her loom cold gray pillars and the tangle-haired visage with Medusa eyes._

 _‘You fought them, tamed them. Bent them to your will. Not by the sword but by sex and seduction.’_

 _Silence. Cold silence, eternity held in its piercing glare._

 _‘Fight me.’_


End file.
